In terms of popularity, hunting in Pennsylvania ranks just behind a cold Rolling Rock and just ahead of NASCAR, so getting our hands on hunting accident statistics seemed like a natural.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission had a database of hunting accidents going back to 1983. Getting the data from the commission was quite easy and it was relatively clean. However, it was lacking some basic information, meaning a couple of our story ideas were killed right off the bat. For example, it didn't contain information on alcohol involvement in accidents. Nor did it contain information about where on the body a person was shot or any information that identified the individuals involved.
We saw a chance to clear up a sometimes-fatal misconception, but to make it work we needed a human story.
But the table did contain a wealth of other information concerning every reported shooting accident in the state going back to 1984. We had information about what they were doing at the time of the shooting, the cause, the topography of the area, whether they were wearing required blaze orange and their ages, among many other items.
Background
Hunting accident analysis has been well covered by other papers, so James ran some queries based on information we'd seen featured in stories archived by IRE and NICAR. He started with the types of guns involved, peak periods, what types of animals the hunters were going after, etc. Because neither of us are hunters, Dave spent some time attending the hunter education classes required for licensing.
After a couple of weeks we compared notes, and one item stood out: Although Dave's contacts insisted that younger hunters (17 and under) were the safest because they'd more recently received instruction, the data clearly showed that younger hunters were much more likely to be involved in accidents, on both ends of the gun.
After consulting with our outdoors editor and confirming that top state officials, as well as instructors, believed the myth about young hunters, we had the premise of our story. It appeared that even the state's top game commission officials had bought into the myth without checking their own records.
We saw a chance to clear up a sometimes-fatal misconception, but to make it work we needed a human story.
Beyond records
We matched dates and locations of the incidents to our paper's computerized library and homed in on some half-dozen incidents involving young hunters. The first person we contacted, a widow in Columbia County, turned out to be the interview we needed to make the story work. Her husband had been accidentally shot and killed by their 12-year-old son during their first hunting trip a few years before.
That boy's experiences, just weeks after he'd taken the state-mandated hunting safety course, provided a springboard for us to examine hunting-safety instruction in Pennsylvania and compare it to other states where hunting is just as popular. The story showed that our state was far behind many others when it came to exposing students to gun-safety programs.
James Wilkerson can be reached by e-mail at james.wilkerson@mcall.com. David Washburn, who is now with the San Diego Union-Tribune, can be reached by e-mail at david.washburn@uniontrib.com